"Burned" out

As if I needed another reason to dislike summer, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. I had been planning to attempt to ride two imperial centuries in the first two days of 2005, but being sunburned today on the final day of 2004 has put paid to that. I can really only blame myself, it was in the final stages of the ride home from Brisbane -- reflection off the water mainly. Guess that's what happens when you take the coastal route.



Of course, the time in Brisbane was spent assisting my mother with moving apartments. Something she seems to do with alarming regularity. At least she's now eliminated most of the really big furniture. Small inner city apartments in Brisbane don't leave much scope for that I guess. I did get a pleasant early morning trip to Mt Coot-tha -- a reserve to the west of Brisbane city, but that was about the only exciting thing I've been up to in the last couple of days. It was nice to see the mist obsure the surrounding suburbia that day.







Apparently there was a road rage incident near Brisbane Airport yesterday. I'm told that two drivers had a heated argument over a parking space, one guy took off at high speed when he lost, clattered into a young woman on a pedestrian crossing, who ended up with serious brain damage as a result of the collision. The driver himself suffered a heart attack as a consequence and died.

The reason I say "apparently" above is because the local news didn't see fit to report it. Now I know the Tsunami in South East Asia has quite understandably taken up a lot of media space in recent times, but surely this incident deserves some kind of billing -- especially in view of the fuss made over the "selection shocks" in the Australian cricket team. What I want to know is this -- is this another function of society losing focus? Or have incidents like this (and indeed deaths on roads generally) become so common that it's not considered worth even a 30 second news report?